Brotherhood of the Tomb

by Daniel Easterman

  ‘Russian,’ Chekulayev said, meaning the cigarette. ‘At my age, you get used to things. And my people get suspicious of agents who acquire a taste for Western comforts. Just as yours are wary of a man with a penchant for leftish ideology. We never ask what a man thinks - that’s far too abstract. It’s what he wants that makes him dangerous.’ He breathed out a thin pillar of smoke. Patrick wondered if there was still a Russian word for ‘sacrilege’.

  ‘A few weeks ago,’ Chekulayev began, ‘I came to Dublin from Egypt. I was following rumours, a lead I’d picked up in Alexandria. Perhaps you’ve heard the rumours yourself. Tell me or not, as you like -it’s your decision.

  ‘Anyway, tonight I followed a man to the coast. He drove a little Citroen. A very careful driver. A little slow: not easy to follow. He parked his car on a road by the sea. After a while, he got out and walked down the road a little; then he began to wait. I waited too. You understand, Patrick. In this business of ours, waiting is of such importance.

  ‘But our friend was not too clever. He let himself be seen. Someone attacked him.’ The Russian put the cigarette to his lips and inhaled slowly. He did not look at Patrick.

  ‘I think you know what happened after that,’ he continued. ‘When you came out the second time, I followed you. That’s the truth, Patrick. You led me here yourself.’

  Patrick felt the pew beneath his thighs, cold and hard. It reminded him of long Masses he had sat through as a child, of the confessional’s dank odour, of guilt, remorse and tears. And of the terrible boredom of life.

  What made you show yourself, Alex? Didn’t you want to follow me any more? Didn’t you want to see where I might lead you?’

  ‘I decided it was time we talked. Time we shared our thoughts. We can help one another. Don’t you agree?’

  Patrick said nothing. Across the vanishing rows of silent pews, he could still make out the unmoving figure of Eamonn De Faoite, inexplicably murdered. In the early morning stillness, the small church filled with ghosts. Men he had killed or allowed to die. Men he had betrayed, men he had bought and sold, all dead or as good as dead, all unshriven, all unforgiving. Hasan Abi Shaqra coming to him for amnesty, his blood shattered across the dust like bright red shards of glass, abandoned eyes opening and closing in disbelief.

  ‘I’m no longer with the Agency, Alex. It’s true, whether or not you choose to believe me. I know nothing of your rumours, I never saw the man you followed before tonight. I’m not lying to you.’

  Up aloft, tiny feet scratched on wood. Years ago, someone had seen a vision here, a statue moving or oozing blood, or perhaps the Virgin herself, pale in a blue veil - Patrick could not remember. What did it matter anyway? Nothing had changed. And a priest lay dead on the altar with his sins still heavy on his heart.

  ‘Please tell me what you know, Patrick. We aren’t children. I don’t believe in coincidence.’

  ‘I’ve told you. I’m no longer in circulation. If you don’t believe me, have it checked out. One phone call, that’s all it’ll take.’

  Chekulayev lifted the cigarette from his lips. He did it without affectation or self-consciousness.

  “You were always too trusting, Patrick. That’s a great fault in an agent. Perhaps you thought I was your friend. Some of us thrive on that conceit, that we are brothers beneath the skin, allies beneath our ideologies. It was easy to think that in Beirut. They hated us all without discrimination. They took us hostage, killed us. We were all unbelievers, all without salvation. And such a camaraderie that gave us: my enemy’s enemy is my friend. Such talk. Such foolishness.

  ‘People like us don’t have friends, Patrick. We can’t afford to. For me it would be the final luxury, something more insidious than American cigarettes or French perfume. Friendship has a smell of decadence, it lies on the skin longer than attar of roses. They would smell it on my body and whip the skin from my flesh and the flesh from my bones to exorcize it. So please don’t ask me to believe you. Tell me the truth instead. Tell me about Passover.’

  Patrick started. Not ‘pass over’, but ‘Passover’. Was that what De Faoite had said? What did it mean? He said nothing. This was such a game. They were playing such a game. ‘Tell me what you know. Tell me the truth.’ Like children at charades, they mimed and signed to one another with grotesque gestures. But unlike children, they sought to confuse, to mislead, to pervert one another. In this world, truths became falsehoods, falsehoods truths, until all became a single, consuming lie.

  Like a worshipper, rapt by the sight of God’s blood wine-like in a gold chalice, he stared ahead, saying nothing. Chekulayev made a small gesture with his cigarette, a little red gesture that pin-pricked the darkness. There was a footstep in the shadows behind them. Something hard and cold pressed against the nape of Patrick’s neck. He heard the unmistakable sound of a pistol bolt drawn back.

  ‘I think,’ Chekulayev whispered, as though in belated recognition of the dim sanctity of the place, ‘I think you had better come with us.’

  NINE

  The house looked like every safe house he had ever visited or lived in: a little shabby, a little damp, a little sad. They took his blindfold off once the car was safe inside the garage. A dull green door led into the house itself. Chekulayev went ahead, saying nothing. Cheap carpets patterned in lilac, flocked wallpaper, damp-stained cornices: a cut-price haven for the morally dispossessed. Safe houses are like railway platforms: not places but moments in time.

  There had not yet been time to feel afraid. That, he knew, would come. Ordinarily, Chekulayev would never have dared pick him up and bring him here. There were unwritten rules, and abducting the opposition’s agents on neutral territory was one of the least bendable. The Russian must be worried. Worried about something big.

  They followed a dingy wooden staircase to the top of the house, on the third floor. Chekulayev opened a door and preceded Patrick into a small, sparsely-furnished room. A couple of armchairs upholstered in drab green Dralon, a coffee table bearing the ring-marks left by hours of unrelieved boredom, a landscape print that might have represented anywhere from the Urals to the hills of Wicklow.

  On the wall facing the door a little lamp burned on a copper bracket. Chekulayev took hold of it and pulled it towards him. A second door opened in the wall. The Russian stood back and ushered Patrick through the opening.

  ‘Please,’ he said. ‘After you.’

  Patrick stepped inside. This was a smaller room, its walls soundproofed, like a radio studio. It held a metal table, bolted to the floor, and two uncomfortable wooden chairs. A bright bulb was screwed into the dead centre of the ceiling, protected from tampering by stout wire mesh. The floor was uncarpeted. In one corner sat a toilet bowl with a plain wooden seat. A large mirror had been built into one wall. There was nowhere to wash or shave. He turned just in time to see the door close heavily behind him.

  Chekulayev shared the interrogation with a woman. Her full name was Natalya Pavlovna Nikitina, and Patrick noticed that Chekulayev, when addressing her, never omitted her patronymic. He guessed her age to be about forty and her rank in the RGB at least that of major. She and Chekulayev took turns through the days and nights that followed, leaving Patrick little time for rest.

  Natalya Pavlovna, Patrick assumed, would have cover as a first secretary or assistant attache at the embassy on Orwell Road. She was thin, patient, and given to long silences. Her long black hair was always tied back in a bun, held in place by pins. She dressed plainly and always in black, as though in constant mourning. Her long pale neck gleamed like alabaster.

  Patrick thought her anorexic at first, but in time revised his estimate: Natalya Pavlovna was an ascetic.

  The pale limbs, the vestigial breasts, the alabaster neck reminded him of a ballerina. But this woman was dedicated to a different dance and moved to a different music. Where Chekulayev feared the lash that would open his skin and bring to light his inwardness, she welcomed its lacerations. Where he was sensual and used deprivation as a threat, she w
as abstinent and treated the rigours of interrogation as a discipline out of which truth, chastened and polished, would finally emerge.

  Patrick had no way of telling how much time passed. No natural light entered the room. The powerful bulb in the ceiling was never extinguished. Patrick would waken from a broken, desperate sleep to see Natalya Pavlovna or Chekulayev standing by his side, ready to begin another session.

  The worst were those with the woman. She had served her apprenticeship on the women’s block in Leningrad’s Kresty prison, before the block was turned into a psychiatric wing. There she had learned the rhythms of pain and the cadences of despair. She understood the finesse that left the skin unbroken and the mind in tatters. She spoke the language of betrayal in all its vernaculars. But the language of her heart was suffering: she knew it in herself and taught it to others, unselfconsciously.

  From the Kresty, she had been transferred to Moscow’s Lefortovo prison, where she had worked on dissidents like Solzhenitsyn and Bukovskii. She had talked at length about her experiences there. Above all, she remembered the great nets the authorities had stretched across the gaps between the landings, to prevent inmates from throwing themselves to their deaths.

  ‘Think of me as a net,’ she would say to Patrick. ‘I’m here to help you, to stop you falling. There’s nothing to be afraid of.’

  The room became a nightmare. Floor and walls and ceiling merged into a landscape without shape or dimension. The light never dimmed or flickered. Soon after Patrick’s arrival, an orderly had taken away his clothes and given him a long white shift to wear instead. No sounds reached him from outside. He knew he could not be heard, even if he screamed.

  It was clear from the outset that the mirror was a one-way glass through which they kept him under constant surveillance. He would sit facing it for hours, like an animal in a zoo, staring at his captors. At other times, he turned his back on them and stared at the other wall.

  Food was left for him in bowls while he slept. It came regularly enough to stave off real hunger pangs, but not often enough or in sufficient quantities to satisfy. It never varied: white rice, a few beans, cold black coffee. The empty bowls were removed while he slept again, which was seldom. The coffee kept him high and awake for long periods. When he did sleep, he was restless and easily wakened. He quickly became disorientated. He suffered from constipation, then bouts of severe diarrhoea that kept him huddled for hours over the toilet. He would wake from disturbed dreams, shaking and nauseous.

  Sometimes they would let him sleep ten or fifteen minutes, then waken him by banging loudly on the door. That would continue for hours: each time he began to nod off, the banging would start, until he grew agitated and angry. By the tenth or eleventh time, he would be so tired and confused that he started weeping from sheer frustration. Afterwards, he would feel ashamed of his tears: he was determined to show his gaolers no signs of weakness. But the tears came, whether he wished them or not.

  He dreamed of De Faoite incessantly, of the wounded and bleeding altar on which he lay, inarticulate, like a tortured animal. The priest would rise and open cracked lips and whisper a single word over and over: Passover, Passover. And in the dream flakes of plaster would crumble and fall from the high vaulted ceiling, white and sharp as snow, drifting across the bloody church, blanching its floor and walls, bleaching it of all corruption.

  ‘Talk to me, Patrick,’ Natalya Pavlovna would say in a hushed voice, like one of the nuns he had known as a child, praying, alone with God. ‘Tell me about yourself. Tell me about your past. We have plenty of time, all the time in the world.’

  But he sensed an urgency in her voice, a frisson of alarm that belied the patience with which she approached her task. She never spoke of things directly, never asked leading questions. Her inquisition was roundabout, yet Patrick knew it hungered for a certain and sudden quarry.

  At first, Patrick would not respond to these overtures. He kept a determined silence, as though vowed to it. That was his novitiate. But as time passed and he lost track of night and day, present and past, dream and reality, he came to crave Natalya Pavlovna’s visits more and more. In the end, he felt only gratitude for her presence and an overwhelming desire to please her.

  At times he would wake out of some twisted dream or nightmare to find his mind preternaturally sharp, and in such moments he knew his gratitude to be no more than Natalya Pavlovna had contrived. But he could not wholly throw it aside. Lack of sleep and repeated caffeine buzzes kept him off balance. His resources were diminished, his resistance increasingly difficult to summon. There were moments when he felt he loved her, her soft, reassuring voice, her dark, questioning eyes.

  It was not love, of course, but fear mixed with gratitude. And yet at times he could feel a shiver of sexuality pass between them. Even nuns on their hard beds wake with a shudder of desire. Often when she visited, he had the beginnings of an erection. Her subtlety was like a finger drawn along his flesh. They experienced a growing intimacy. Her questions were a lover’s hands, stripping him bare. He would wake up sweating, dreaming of betrayal. But who was left for him to betray?

  On several occasions, she asked him about his sins, major and minor, old and new. It was a way into his soul, and from his soul to his heart, and thence to his mind, where he kept all his recollections of names and dates and places. Natalya Pavlovna cared nothing for theology. Sins were nothing to her, or at best keys with which to unlock the doors of Patrick’s mind.

  ‘Think of me as a priest,’ she would murmur, ‘as a father confessor. How long is it since your last confession?’

  And Patrick - who had indeed been many years absent from the confessional, and who did indeed suffer from a guilty conscience and the creeping footsteps of unquiet ghosts - unburdened his spirit gladly and without remorse.

  Natalya Pavlovna never rushed, never applied overt pressure, though it was becoming increasingly clear that she was working against time. From sins religious they passed to sins secular, from morals they ascended to pragmatism and the absolutism of the state.

  The sessions with Chekulayev were more down to earth. Unlike the woman, he was not interested in the state of Patrick’s soul. After a session with Natalya, Patrick found it almost a relief to be faced with Chekulayev’s directness.

  He knew the names of Patrick’s principal agents in Egypt and Lebanon, most of his contacts in the PLO and Hezbollah, and several of his agents of influence in Syria. He had details of CIA houses in Cairo and Port Said. He could recite details of several important cases in which Patrick had been involved, including some that had gone wrong, wrong enough to lead to unnecessary loss of life. He knew about Hasan Abi Shaqra.

  What he sought, of course, were the gaps. The things he knew were nothing to those of which he was ignorant. But Patrick knew when to talk and when to keep silent.

  ‘Tell me about Shifrin.’ Chekulayev returned time and time again to Patrick’s old mentor, his station chief in Cairo. When did he tell you about Passover? What does he know about the Brotherhood?’ Patrick did not answer, for the simple reason that he had nothing to offer.

  Natalya Pavlovna, however, possessed the skill to blur the difference between what she knew and what she did not. Each time they spoke, Patrick sensed his resistance weakening. He had talked and he wanted to talk more. He longed to confide in her. The white walls pressed in on him like the blocks of a hydraulic press. He thought they were growing closer. But he could not bring himself to measure them.

  ‘Tell me about Passover.’ Natalya Pavlovna returned to the subject with increasing frequency. She seemed almost nervous. Her thin hands lay on her lap like pale, crustless crabs, naked and exposed. ‘What do you know of Migliau? Is he here? In Ireland? What have you heard? Have they set a date?’

  To all of these questions Patrick could only plead complete ignorance. His head ached and he longed for darkness. Even with his eyes closed, the bright light lanced his brain like a thin blade.

  ‘I’ve told you. All I know of
“Passover” is that De Faoite mentioned it before he died.’

  ‘You mutter it in your sleep. I’ve heard you many times.’ This admission that she eavesdropped on Patrick’s moments of slumber did not seem to cause Natalya Pavlovna any awkwardness. She knew Patrick assumed it, expected it. Sleep was not sacrosanct. In the religion they shared, nothing was sacrosanct. They were like husband and wife now. Surely there could be no more secrets between them.

  He woke three or four times to find himself alone. By the fifth he was sure something was wrong. He was starving: why did no one come? He shouted and banged the walls, but there was no response. Exhausted, he fell asleep again. When he awoke, nothing had changed.

  He called out again. You can hear me, you bastards, you can hear me!

  ‘Where are you, Chekulayev? Where are you, Natalya? Why don’t you answer?’

  But no one responded to his entreaties. A ball of fear settled in his stomach.

  He crouched down by the wall, disorientated. So, they had changed tactics. Isolate him, deprive him of all human contact, starve him. He felt helpless and afraid. How long could he go on? His cupboard was bare, at least of those things Natalya Pavlovna really wanted to hear. Would lies suffice?

  He thought of ways to pass the time, mind games to blot out his growing distress. First, he taught himself to recite the Lord’s Prayer backwards, first in English, then in Latin, as he had learnt it as a child. After that he composed elaborate, meaningless poems in Arabic, in which each word began with the same letter and each line ended with the same rhyme. And he wrote letters in his head to everyone he had ever known. Still no one came.

  For a long time he stood defenceless at the mirror. He watched himself curiously, as he might have watched a monkey in a cage: his unshaven face, his red-rimmed eyes. Perhaps this was all there was